Iqra’i

I know my duty to my American friends. Name: Kate, Identity: British, Sole purpose: provide olde worlde curios, with a smile and charm (much like a trained monkey dressed as a court jester - that’s what they call being “Greece to America’s Rome”) reminding the audience of the quainter side of the Atlantic. So you can expect me to keep you updated with titbits from the motherland.

Some melodrama almost on a par with student politics. I don’t know if an American congressman or senator has ever resigned his seat because he refused to be a member of a House that could pass a particularly piece of legislation. I’d be interested if anyone could tell me. Yet David Davis, the senior Conservative MP responsible for all internal policy, recently stormed out onto the steps of the Houses of Parliament, and announced that he would be calling a special election in his constituency as a protest against the Labour Government’s bill to increase to 42 days the time terror suspects could be held without access to a lawyer. (Think of it as our own little Patriot Act). It’s a real mark of the realignment of British political ground, as Left becomes authoritarian and the Right more concerned with conserving traditions of privacy and liberty. The government appears to have the support of the public on this issue if nothing else, but didn’t have that of its own MPs who had actually studied the legislation - 36 out of 351 of its MPs voted against its own bill, which meant that it had to rely on promises of pork to the nine Northern Irish MPs from the minority Irish party the DUP. Result? Labour won the vote by exactly nine votes. By forcing a special election, Davis wants to create a media storm over the issue big enough to educate the public on the issue, and, he hopes, change public opinion. The election campaign will be the public debate, the special election will be fought on that one issue alone, and the verdict of the polls will be public statement on the issue.

Obviously, Davis’ vision of a glorious triumph isn’t quite working out as he expected. First, he comes from a fairly solidly Conservative area, so no local Conservative victory can really be spun as a statement of support on this one single issue. Secondly, it’s clearly not representative of the nation as a whole. Thirdly, Labour won’t play ball, and are refusing to put up an opposing candidate.

The really sad thing is how incapable the British public now seems of believing that any politician could act on a point of principle. Leading newspapers and Internet mutterings all suggest that Davis must be in the throws of a nervous breakdown, trying to steal the limelight from his party leader, or in someone’s pay. The cause is a phenomenon that ought to worry Democrats. Ten years ago,  a messianic forty-something man with a young family and more brash wife, the centre of a Cult of Personality whose fervent Christian faith found its expression in calls for social justice, who claimed to be on the Centre-Left but was such a media baby that one was never sure what was spin and what was substance, was swept to power in a wave of national adulation. He vowed that his administration would be the breath of fresh air in the capital city that banished the political elite’s casual corruption and instead would be “whiter than white”. Yet ten years later, the man who made us believe that conviction politicians existed has turned the public into a population to whom the word politician means “corrupt liar”. It’s not just Iraq that has baptised the Prime Minister “Bliar” - it’s still entirely plausible to believe, as I do, that Blair searched his soul and did what he believed right - but the constant allegations that donations to the Labour Party resulted in peerages, contracts and even legal exemptions being granted to the donors.

There is no country now more convinced than America that conviction-politicians can be saints. On the morning of Blair’s victory in 1997 there was no country more convinced than Britain. If Rezko/Auchi proves to be the tip of the iceberg of funding scandals, or if, as is more likely, it is beyond Obama’s powers to do much for the lives of African-Americans in office, the disillusionment will give rise to a cynical backlash not just against Obama, but against all in public life. And that level of public bitterness ain’t fun for anybody.